Mary Parker Follett – political entrepreneur and prophet of modern management

„Leaders and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose.” (Follett, Freedom and Co-ordination, 1949, p.55)

Extended version of a previous chapter in: Winfried Weber: Die Purpose-Wirtschaft (2024), eBook (Amazon Kindle http://tiny.cc/9eznzz  ) first published in German, here in my blog: June 30, 2022

Misleading terms quite often become established in management jargon, such as “management guru”. Anyone searching for another unwieldy keyword such as “mother of modern management” will find nothing on e.g. German-language websites. The keyword “father of modern management”, on the other hand, yields countless hits, especially for Peter Drucker.

Drucker, in turn, and another management pioneer, Warren Bennis, point to a female pioneer, Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), when asked about the pioneering work or source code of modern management approaches. Follett deserves the credit for first bringing a paradigm shift and disruptive innovations in management to the world. However, this influential pioneer was soon forgotten after her death in 1933 and is now known only in a few small circles in English-speaking countries.

Here's an anecdote: in 1951, Lyndall Urwick, former director of the Geneva International Management Institute, pointed out to Drucker after his speech that his wording and writings were very similar to those of Mary Parker Follett. Drucker responded by asking, ‘Mary who?’ Many years later, in the foreword to an anthology, Drucker referred to her as ‘the prophet of management’ (in: Graham, Mary P. Follett. Prophet of Management, Boston, 1995, p.1). Bennis describes her as a ‘swashbuckling advance scout of management thinking’ and summarises her influence as follows: ‘Just about everything written today about leadership and organisations comes from Mary Parker Follett's writings and lectures.’ (in: Graham, 1995, p.178). Henry Mintzberg (1995) interprets her work in this way: ‘We are still mesmerised by Fayol's idea of hierarchy. And all too often we are blind to the insight of equal cooperation, this wonderful concept of ‘collective responsibility’ according to Mary Follett.’

It is astonishing. Mary Parker Follett is thus considered by the gentlemen's club of ‘management gurus’ to be the pioneering great mind of modern management. For those ‘gurus’ Drucker, Bennis and Mintzberg, she is regarded as an adventurous pathfinder in the organisational thicket and in exploring the relevance and legitimacy of the management profession in modern society. Mary Parker Follett's contributions to modern management and beyond, to the importance of organisations and the management function for the further development of democracy, have largely been forgotten – as is so often the case in management theory and practice. There is little obligation to refer to primary sources from original authors. Worse still, in a world of management fads, these sources are usually not even known.

A remarkable parallel between Mary Parker Follett and Peter Drucker immediately strikes the reader. In the first two or three decades of their careers, both were initially interested in political and sociological issues and published mainly texts on questions of democratic theory and the further development of liberal democracy. Follett only began to take a closer interest in management issues in the mid-1920s, when she was over fifty, after several business leaders became aware of her political consulting work and new approaches on organisational development. Drucker also came into contact with industrial managers by chance when, in the 1940s, he was invited by Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors, then the world's largest car manufacturer, to spend two years looking at how industry was organised as an outsider with his political and social science analyses of totalitarianism research (Concept of the Corporation, 1946; especially Chapter 3: ‘The corporation is a social institution’).

Follett and Drucker both base their later books and their thinking on organisation and leadership not on business science, but on social science or historical findings. Drucker speaks of ‘management as a liberal art’ and Follett, initially a social entrepreneur, refers in particular to practical experience in social cohesion, social innovation and community work as a developer of social communities.

In both biographies, it was only at the age of over fifty or forty, respectively, that management topics became a late professional research focus for the two thinkers, whose personal achievements and significance for the development of democracy and management are now hardly recognised or even widely acknowledged.

Follett's significance as a practical philosopher, democracy researcher and management philosopher is based on interdisciplinarity, applicability, empirical evidence and a style that is understandable and elegant for a broad audience, sometimes taking on an almost lyrical character. Her first projects as a social entrepreneur focused on integrating Irish immigrant communities in the Roxbury neighbourhood of Boston and establishing a low-threshold community centre. While women and children took advantage of the social counselling services, Irish men tended to stay away. Follett therefore founded a debating club for them on political issues and developed adult education programmes in which participants could acquire civic engagement skills and learn about civil society, history, economics and social issues. For many young men in this debating club, this was the start of a significant professional career in business or politics (see the biography of Joan Tonn, 2003). Follett became a co-founder of a social movement in Boston (the ‘community centres movement’). Her later work can only be understood against the backdrop of this civic engagement and her experience in building grassroots organisations in which members were empowered to participate in civic life at a higher level and, quite incidentally, became integrated into Boston's community and civil society.

In Follett's highly acclaimed books ‘The Speaker of the House of Representatives’ (1896) and ‘The New State - Group Organisation. The solution of Popular Government’ (1918), Follett argued that democracy must be learned. ‘Sooner or later everyone in a democracy must ask himself, what am I worth to society?’ (Follett, 1918:368). Her questions revolved around the new challenges facing politics (including as an advisor to Theodore Roosevelt), group dynamics, power games, the tension between the individual and society, and the preservation of plurality and diversity.

Her blueprints for practical politics aimed at integration, participation, decentralisation, balance of power, interdependencies, civil society ‘self-government’ and the important role of the local community. ‘The study of democracy has been based largely on the study of institutions; it should be based on the study of how men behave together.’ (Follett, 1918, 19) and elsewhere, “Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression of the whole … When each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live completely in every member, then we have a true society” (Follett, 1918, 77).

A central concept for Follett is integration. For Follett, mutual influence between people, between people in groups and in communities, is the key to the further development of an open society. ‘Integration is a basic human need,’ she says, adding, ‘our happiness, our sense of living at all is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union‘ (1918, 194) or elsewhere, ’When you get to a situation, it becomes what it was plus you; you are responding to the situation plus yourself, that is, to the relation between it and yourself’ (1924, 133).

Drucker also first became known for his research on totalitarianism. Drucker's book ‘The End of Economic Man. The Origin of Totalitarianism’ (1939), written in exile in the United States, is considered a classic in Great Britain and Japan. Drucker was one of the first to formulate a theory of totalitarianism and analyse the economic and intellectual foundations of totalitarian systems in the European context. His book was praised by Winston Churchill, for example (in: Times Literary Supplement, 1939, link https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/churchill-and-drucker-perfect-together/ ). Drucker argues that fascism embodies ‘pure negation’ based on ‘naked authority’ without any legitimacy. He explains the European crisis with the collapse of the liberal promise and the individualised individual who becomes susceptible to scapegoat theories and mass suggestion.It is remarkable that both Follett and Drucker expanded their social and political analyses of democracy by applying them to the social system of organisation and the social function of management.

A key to understanding the political entrepreneur and management innovator Mary Parker Follett (born 1868) is her life story. Even as a girl, she had to take on responsibility early on in a chaotic family situation. Her father, traumatised by the Civil War, was an alcoholic and died when she was a teenager. Her mother was physically disabled, so she had to take care of her and her younger brother. Equipped with the self-discipline of her Quaker roots, she enrolled at a women's college in Harvard in her early twenties, studied political science, law, philosophy and economics, and began publishing her first works after two semesters abroad at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. While working as a high school teacher and doing research for a Boston lawyer, she published her first book on political theory, The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896). When her alma mater, Radcliffe College, was allowed to award higher academic degrees to women from 1898 onwards, she completed her doctorate with summa cum laude. Following her extensive studies on government action, she developed a variety of projects in Boston between 1900 and 1915 as a social entrepreneur, community worker and education officer. When she came into contact with industrial managers (such as Henry S. Dennison and later B. Seebohm Rowntree) in the mid-1910s, her work and the response to her social innovations began to extend to important political and economic decision-makers. From a social entrepreneur, manager of Boston's social communities and thus also a political entrepreneur, she developed into a publicist and lecturer, political advisor and prophet of modern management, whose wisdom was drawn from many sources. At a Harvard Graduate Seminar in 1927, she once said, ‘I am giving my experience. I am not giving philosophy out of a book.’

With her theory of human interaction and practical tools for the further development of democracy, she remains a pioneer and heroine. As a political and social entrepreneur, she can inspire and give new impetus to founders in this field today. For today's political and social entrepreneurs, she can be considered a thinker who, with her clear compass for the common good and the stabilisation of open society, can provide answers to today's threats to democracy.

Through precise observation of hierarchical management processes, Follett developed important central concepts and new approaches to management. A classic management approach in hierarchical structures weakens the structures of an organisation. Power needs to be redefined. Modern management is no longer based on ‘power over’ but on ‘power with’.  Those who understand power as ‘power over’ in order to achieve their own goals act in a (self-)destructive manner. This requires ever greater use of power to achieve the goals that have been set. Management is always and primarily about working with others. The focus is on interactive influence and group processes with potential for self-organisation rather than stabilising hierarchical structures. In post-Taylorist organisations, people take responsibility, and those who help design the organisation or solve problems have subtle power potentials to evade or disrupt hierarchical power (think of Melville's Bartleby character). Leadership becomes reciprocal; those who are led also take on leadership roles. ‘The study of community as a process dissolves hierarchy because it allows us to emphasise the qualitative rather than the quantitative.’ (Follett 1919)

Mary Parker Follett, as a pioneer in the paradigm shift of theories on the use of power, knowledge organisation, social network theory of organisation, the role of organisation in liberal democracy, conflict management and her ‘self-governing principle’, has found her way into all modern forms of organisation and democratic development. It is no exaggeration to say that the way we organise the world of work today and the origins of modern management can be traced back to her work.

As well, Follett's contribution to understanding the deeper foundations of such an important profession today as political consulting and political entrepreneurship at the interface of technology, campaigning and democracy cannot be overestimated. Mary Parker Follett prepared the crucial key questions for this development. What is democracy? How can we understand the way we work together, organise and lead as permanent communication and renewal of a living democracy? How do we deal with conflicts? Do we see conflicts as opportunities, as ‘creative conflicts’? Do we see conflicts not only as a danger, but as an indication of diversity – and thus of potential to ‘make them work for us’? Don't conflicts simply mean the diversity that has become visible and the areas of friction in society from which something new can emerge? Do conflicts require integration rather than the traditional and simplified compromise? How do we then deal with social differences? Do we integrate the differences and stop merely smoothing them over? Do we stabilise democracy, particularly in the grassroots work of self-governance in local communities, civil society and organisations that increase their internal diversity and thus make liberal modernity so efficient and adaptable?

And last but not least: why has Mary Parker Follett been forgotten? She was intellectually ahead of her time. She did not fit into the authoritarian organisational logic of industrialisation and the later managerism (Manfred Höfle). She was a woman in a male-dominated discipline. Her texts posed questions that were too big and too complex for her contemporaries in politics and for the simplistic management fads of the last century. But today, in a world of AI, data power, manipulation by tech bros, and at the same time agility, networks, self-organisation, and collaborative systems, she is finally being understood (I owe many insights to my discussion with Maria Spindler and Melanie Whittaker).

When you read Mary Parker Follett's texts today, you would think they were written yesterday. ‘Mary is in my head,’ said a speaker at a forum in Mannheim about Mary Parker Follett. We should see her as a pioneer of a movement that knew how to strengthen democracy. With her legacy of constantly rearming ourselves against all forms of authoritarianism, she helps us to resist today's backlash. Just as we still remember the medieval Joan of Arc, who forced powerful opponents to surrender.